


It Wasn't Ever a Choice, Was It?

by blinksxoxo



Series: HP Endurance Fics [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, HP Endurance, Prompt 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-09
Updated: 2014-04-09
Packaged: 2018-01-18 19:32:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1440178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blinksxoxo/pseuds/blinksxoxo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The one decision he made in his right mind, the one to come here tonight, was that last decision he was ever going to make</p>
            </blockquote>





	It Wasn't Ever a Choice, Was It?

_It was never really a choice, was it, Pads?_ Sirius thought to himself as Bella’s curse hit him, knocking him backwards into the depths of oblivion. It wasn’t a choice when he was eleven, alone and ostracized, the third Black in history to publicly embarrass the family by not being sorted into Slytherin.

            He had tried, truly, to salvage the scraps of his family ties by befriending James. _Toujours pur,_ and all of that rubbish his mother spewed. James was pure as Gryffindors come, after all, with his family that was nearly as powerful as the Blacks. Moony and the traitor were accidental friends. A pure coincidence of rooming together and complete lack of privacy ensures a sort of fragile camaraderie amongst eleven-year-old boys.

Of course, the Lupins were his mother’s least favorite of wizarding families. Any wizard who loved a Muggle was a blood-traitor, and blood-traitors were worse than Squibs, who were worse than Muggle-borns. Although, as soon as Sirius realized his parents weren’t going to forgive him for being sorted into Gryffindor, he instantly became closer to Remus, and the summer after his second year, he decided to perma-stick the posters to the wall. His room was transfigured into a shrine of Gryffindor paraphernalia and Muggle attractions. His mother cried when she saw the walls, and he thought his father was going to hex him into oblivion. _He would have, if Reg hadn’t been there._

Sirius should have looked for his parents’ silver little child, silver of course, his mother reminded him, of being much more regal than the gaudy attention gold demanded. No one really said anything about Regulus when he disappeared so long ago, even before Sirius’s incarceration.

            It wasn’t really a choice to not date all the girls he saw. They never really interested him, with their twittering and weird smelling potions and fake curled hair. There was a war brewing. It had been brewing for years by the time he was truly able to do anything about it, but, unlike James and Peter, Sirius never really even thought about girls. Not that he thought about blokes either, mind; it just never came together the right way for him to have a girl. He’d stolen a fair share of kisses, though. What with the women who followed him around at times, claiming that his eyes were like icy diamonds or some half-arsed compliment like that.

* * *

 

 

_“Not that bad looking, was she, Sirius?” James asked, as they came up the corridor after potions with that old bag, Slughorn._

_“She was fit enough, I’m just not in the mood to have some bird following me around asking to hold hands is all.” He replied, thinking of how smoothly the transformation of the candles in the Great Hall had gone. He and James had bewitched them in the middle of the night to resemble diseased phalluses._

_“Fit enough? Blimey, Pads, she was_ perfect,” _Peter said, catching up to them from behind._

_“You think anyone with tits is fit enough. Also, do us all a favor and stop calling me Pads. The whole bloody point of the nicknames was so we didn’t land in deep shit if the map is found.”_

_“Sirius, lighten up, you know it’s been over an hour since Pete last had food. Take it easy on him,” James interjected, “And look, here comes our golden little moon child.”_

_Remus emerged from the writhing mass of underage students scurrying to reach their classrooms on time, right on James’s cue. Something about the way his shoulders drooped and how his feet drugged with an audible scrape against the floor gave away the exhaustion that wracked his body. The moon was tonight._

_“Oi, Remus, seen Snivellus around? I think he’s been extra slimey today,” Sirius shouted in greeting._

_Remus smiled in return, a small quirk of the lips which was almost unnoticed. “I try to avoid   illithids if I can.”_

_“Well,_ _that seems like a plan, Rem. Nonetheless, I’d like to find out what the sneaky little monster is up to.”_

_Sirius had seen Snape slipping around the corridors for days, watching their every move. Remus pretended like it didn’t happen, Peter was completely oblivious, and James said that they would deal with it tomorrow while Moony was in the hospital wing. But Sirius had other plans._

_Sirius thought back to that night in their sixth year often in the following years. Remus didn’t speak to him for months, James for weeks, and Peter was really the only consoler he had. Not that Sirius believed he needed consoling; he mostly needed to be shoved into the Lake and eaten by the squid. It would be less painful than the reminder that his prank had turned his mates against him._

* * *

 

And when they graduated, and the only job Remus could find were Muggle ones, and James went into the auror academy, Sirius lived off the inheritance he received when his uncle Alphard died. Peter lived with him on and off, between living with whichever desperate middle-aged witch took him in as a gesture of what Sirius preferred to think of as motherly instincts rather than lust. Although James and Remus sniggered about it constantly in the way that made Sirius want to gag.

He tried, on multiple occasions, to get Remus to move out of his parents’ house and in with him, or even to find a Muggle flat to stay in, but Remus insisted that his parents didn’t mind having him around. It was too late by the time Sirius and James realized that Remus had been staying with his parents to protect them from Greyback, who slaughtered Lyall Lupin and his wife fourteen months after they graduated from Hogwarts. Remus was at work when it happened, and when he called the aurors, they took him in, claiming that he had murdered them out of spite for the incident which changed him when he was young. Dumbledore made sure he was found innocent, but the rest of the Order, that is, everyone who was not Sirius and James, started sending shaded glances at Remus in meetings. Even Peter, who Sirius thought lacked the capacity to be paranoid seemed even more skittish around Remus after that. Remus then followed his friends’ advice and started renting a place in London a few blocks away from Sirius.

James and Lily married that summer, and Harry was born a year later. The new Marauder was…smelly. Sirius loved it. The weird shock of black hair on his abnormally gigantic head was always charged with static, and would shock anyone who had the carelessness to slide by it. And then Dumbledore said he had an informant, and Harry was in danger.

James insisted that Sirius be the secret keeper, and Sirius argued right back. Everyone knew that James would assign the job to Sirius. Everyone, including Remus, who “never had time” and was always tossing out excuses to miss dinners, although he never missed an Order meeting. Sirius hated it, hating thinking of Remus that way, but what else did he have? Someone was feeding information to the Death Eaters. Peter was too stupid, the Prewetts were dead, and the other side would rather have Mad-Eye dead than even think of cooperating with him. James and Lily were at risk, and it wasn’t Sirius himself. It had to be Remus, besides, didn’t wolves run in packs? It wasn’t really a choice for him to make Peter the Keeper, or to avoid saying anything delicate about it in front of Remus.

He laughed about it later, a mad, deranged laugh, that he had thought Remus more likely to be a traitor because of the wolf. The wolf Remus hated, the wolf who he was only cursed with because of Greyback, who was one of the most prominent names thrown around in meetings to find. Greyback, Lestrange, Malfoy, Yaxley, Voldemort.

And Sirius had actually believed Remus would go to them, to Greyback.

The only choice Sirius made consciously, the one that mattered most, was showing up tonight. What was the war worth if Harry died? What was bringing about Voldemort’s downfall if Harry was gone, anyways? Nothing mattered compared to that, to Harry’s safety. Sirius sometimes ran his hand over Harry’s head to see if it would still shock him like it used to. It never did; the lightening on his forehead must have taken out all of the electricity that had run through his blood.

Sirius laughed as he thought about it. The one decision he made in his right mind, the one to come here tonight, was that last decision he was ever going to make. He didn’t have a choice of being in Gryffindor, or being friends with James, or trading with Peter, or escaping Azkaban, or going back to Grimmauld Place. But here he was, the first decision he thought about letting Dumbledore handle, and he could hear Harry screaming in the background, and Remus’s calm, quiet, reasonable voice in the background, and the Veil whispered around him, and Bella’s cackle all around. It didn’t hurt, like his mother always threatened, “…kill you…. no son of mine… as painful as I can make it…” or feel peaceful, like James would wax on about school after Evans rejected him for the fourth, fifth, twelfth time. It wrapped him up, in whispers and silk, and he was gone.

**Author's Note:**

> LoC: Hell  
> Character: Sirius Black  
> Prompt: Your character faces a tough decision, one that could affect the rest of their life.  
> Word Count: 1595  
>  PG-13  
> Major Character Death  
> Summary: LoC: Hell  
> Character: Sirius Black  
> Prompt: Your character faces a tough decision, one that could affect the rest of their life.  
> Word Count: 1595  
>  PG-13  
> Major Character Death  
> Summary: The one decision he made in his right mind, the one to come here tonight, was that last decision he was ever going to make.


End file.
